2 Thessalonians

Portrait of Bishop Charles Ellicott By Herbert R. Barraud (died 1896) – Public Domain. Source: WikipediaThis is a detailed commentary on the Greek text of Paul’s Letters to the Thessalonians by Biship Charles Ellicott. As such those with a good knowledge of Greek will benefit most from it. This title is in the public domain.

Table of Contents

Preface to the Third Edition

Preface to the Second Edition

Preface to the First Edition

1 Thessalonians

2 Thessalonians

Introduction

This calm, practical, and profoundly consolatory Epistle was written by the Apostle to his converts in the wealthy and populous city of Thessalonica not long after his first visit to Macedonia ( Acts xvi. 9), when in conjunction with Silas and Timothy he laid the foundations of the Thessalonian Church (Acts xvii. 1 sq.). See notes on ch. i. 1.

The exact time of writing the Epistle appears to have been the early months of the Apostle’s year and a half stay at Corinth (Acts xviii. 11), soon after Timothy had joined him (1 Thess. iii. 6) and reported the spiritual state of their converts, into which he had been sent to enquire (eh. iii. 2), probably from Athens; see notes on eh. iii. 1. We may thus consider the close of A.D. 52, or the beginning of A.D. 53, as the probable date, and, if this be correct, must place the Epistle first on the chronological list of the Apostle’s writings….

The Rev. Alfred Plummer wrote a number of commentaries on the books of the New Testament. As he died more than 70 years ago these are now in the public domain, so I have digitised his two-volume set on Paul’s Letters to the Thessalonians:

Alfred Plummer [1841–1926], A Commentary on St. Paul’s First Epistle to the Thessalonians. London: Robert Scott, 1918. Hbk. pp.116.Click here to download in PDF.

Alfred Plummer [1841–1926], A Commentary on St. Paul’s Second Epistle to the Thessalonians. London: Robert Scott, 1918. Hbk. pp.118. Click here to download in PDF.

Alfred Plummer [1841–1926],

A Commentary on St. Paul’s First Epistle to the Thessalonians.

Introduction

The Epistles to the Thessalonians do not tell us a great deal about the city in which these most interesting converts of the Apostle of the Gentiles lived; but what they tell us harmonizes very well with what we learn from other sources. The passage of the Gospel from Asia to Europe is a momentous event in the history of the Apostolic Age; and it took place when St. Paul, in obedience to what he believed to be a Divine command, ‘set sail from Troas’ and came ‘to Philippi, which is a city of Macedonia, the first of the district, a Roman colony’ (Acts xvi. 8-14). To us this means the spread of Christianity from one continent to another. But that is not the way in which it is regarded in the N.T., in which the word’ Europe’ does not occur, and in which ‘Asia’ never means the continent of Asia. The Apostle of the Gentiles and his historian, St. Luke, seem rather to have regarded the event as a passage from Eastern to Western civilization, an advance from a world in which the best elements had centred in Judaism to a world in which the best elements were found in the art and thought of Greece, and in the political and military organization of Rome.